Some of you may know that I run a YouTube videogaming channel, via which I sometimes manage to interact with industry figures. In the past, this allowed me to get a review copy of Saints Row, for instance. As many of you are aware of, the recently released RPG Baldur’s Gate 3 is a smash hit, far exceeding the commercial expectations of its creator. What is not well known yet, though, is that the backstory of this game is quite different from what it is portrayed in the media. As I live quite close to the development studio Larian, and they agreed on an interview with me, I traveled to their HQ and ended up in a pub with the narrative designer and one of the writers. What I learned was quite unexpected.

In terms of the backstory, it is important to point out that Larian Studios is very well regarded in the industry. In particular their last two games prior to Baldur’s Gate 3 were highly regarded and commercially very successful. Those were Divinity: Original Sin and its sequel. When I inquired about the tonal shift from those games and Baldur’s Gate 3, however, I was quite amazed to learn the following: Apparently, Larian only released the Divinity games to pay the bills and make money. What they really wanted to work on, however, was a medieval sex simulator. They told me that they recently hired some writers from US studios who pointed out that recent academic research irrefutably shows that the middle ages were much more sexually open-minded than previously believed. People used to engage in random sex, without any societal consequences, and only due to the censorship of the Catholic Church did we not learn about this until a few years ago.

Amazingly, some senior developers at Larian hold the Japanese RPG series Rance in high regards. In this series, the titular hero has a lot of straight sex with maidens, and some may even get raped, if you apply modern Western standards of consent. Armed with the latest scientific knowledge, however, Larian wanted to leave a mark and went on to write a lot of medieval sex stories. At this point, my interlocutors started laughing and could not stop for minutes. They said that they had so many sex stories, mostly gay ones, that it was really difficult to fit them into a good story. Jokingly, some called this script “Baldur’s Gays”, someone else referred to it as “Baldur’s Gay Dates”, and then the studio head chimed in that they are in a real pickle because to implement their vision of having an expansive medieval sex simulator, they needed to build a huge world in which these stories could take place. As the studio was awash with cash, they just bought the Baldur’s Gate license, so it all worked out in the end. It is quite amusing that the actual RPG came afterwards, and that at the beginning, it was all about gay sex.

Overall, as I learned, the game has over 1,000 NPCs, and apparently you can have gay sex with almost all of them. The only exception are NPCs in spiritual form, i.e. ghosts. There are a few elven NPCs which are tiny, but apparently the player character has the option to use them as a butt plug, which leads to temporary status boosts. Really, Baldur’s Gate 3 is all about gay sex. Even the game-playing public is slowly becoming aware of this fact. For instance, the ultra-progressive site PC Gamer complained about there being too much gay sex in this game. If an outlet as gay as this one publishes such an article, you know that Baldur’s Gate 3 is nothing but a vehicle to promote gay sex. There are also mods that allow you to block gay sex. If this was unwarranted, this mod would have been banned for homophobia by now.

You may wonder why this game does not just ask you about your sexual orientation, and consequently does not show, for instance, gay sex to straight male players. As I was told, this would have been too difficult to implement because almost every character in this game is “pansexual”, i.e. they fuck absolutely everyone and everything, even ogres or animals. Limiting the player’s sexual options would therefore have undermined the sexual power fantasy Larian Studios was going for. Also, according to those Larian Studio employees the player character does not get “tricked” into gay sex. There just are no other options. Gay sex is simply the natural conclusion of many conversations in this game. Unfortunately, some of the most popular threads on the Steam forums are about there being far too much gay sex in this game. Even one allegedly gay user thinks that there is too much of it. Of course, implementing conversation trees that took into account male camaraderie would be far too difficult to implement. Thus, your player character only has the choice of being gay or rude.

One Larian employee took me aside to show me a screenshot on his phone, which showed a group sex scene in Baldur’s Gate 3 that involved about two dozen characters. You view them in the usual zoomed-out isometric perspective. The scene was a bit much as it included only male characters. They were all nude, and they were positioned in a way that made them look like a human pentagram. He did not tell me how to unlock this scene but he recommended that I do not pursue an antagonistic way of playing. Also, he showed me a medieval rendition of a trans flag, with colors that were a bit more muted. I was quite impressed by how steadfast Larian Studios was in following their vision of creating the ultimate medieval sex simulator.

After I had seen the medieval trans flag, I hurriedly left, however. The gayness on display was way too much for me to take. I furthermore decided to delete Baldur’s Gate 3 from my computer the moment I arrived home. I hope that the developer adds options later on to limit all the gayness, but this may be unlikely to happen as this would reduce the playtime from over 100 hours to less than 20. As of now, Baldur’s Gate 3 is undoubtedly the gayest game in video gaming history.